Prepare your holiday readiness now
Oct 26th, 2021 by Jesper Kråkhede
In my previous post I wrote about the holidays being high season for attackers. This one is for management: prepare your readiness now, not on the 23rd of December.
First, decide who is on call. Not just in IT but in management. If you are hit on Christmas Eve, someone needs the authority to make decisions like shutting down the network, calling in external help or talking to the press. Make sure that person is reachable and knows it.
Second, check that your contacts work. Phone numbers to the SOC, the incident response retainer, the service providers, the insurance company. Write them down on paper too, because during an incident the mail and Teams may be down.
Third, look at your incident response plan. Is it up to date? Has it been tested this year? Does everyone know where it is?
Fourth, reduce the risk before the holidays. Ask IT to patch the critical things, check the backups and pause risky changes. Many companies have a change freeze during the holidays. Good, but make the security fixes before it starts.
And finally, give your people a real break where you can, by staggering the on-call so nobody works the whole holiday.
A plan made in November costs a few meetings. A plan made during the incident costs a lot more.